Settling in a gravity well is just stupid... If you want settle off-planet, the reasonable course is to build a big spinning space station.
Actually...
The moon is a really good place to settle. There is a gravity well; but it's such a small one that you get the convenience without the penalty. It's nice having things fall down; it makes all kinds of useful resources --- rock, ice, metal --- easily accessible, and you don't have to worry about stuff drifting off. Not to mention that all the production techniques we know about involve gravity at some point. It's also nice having such a ludicrously small gravity well that you can get into orbit with something the size of an Apollo lander rather than a Saturn V. It's an excellent compromise.
It's also really nice being three days travel away from home. In the event of an emergency, it's entirely feasible to sprint home directly from the lunar surface. You can't do that from an asteroid, where you've travelled for months just to get there.
You're right in that asteroids are excellent places for robotic mining... unfortunately, we don't know how to do that yet. The state of the art just isn't there. Given that we still don't have the technology to travel anywhere in other than a minimum-energy transfer orbit taken months, and that mission planners have to plot crazy momentum-stealing flybys of practically every inner planet in order to minimise delta-V, launching experimental robot refineries from the surface of the Earth just isn't going to happen. Wait another twenty years and build 'em on the Moon instead. You'll have the knowledge, the personnel, the materials, and you won't have to lift them out of Earth's huge gravity well.
Duality for modules over finite rings and applications to coding theory
Bounding the number of geometric permutations induced by k-transversals
A unified framework for enforcing multiple access control policies
Affine Lie algebras and multisum identities
I think these only qualify as torture if you're a math or computer science graduate student.
You urgently, urgently need to read The Atrocity Archives, by Charlie Stross. You will very quickly change your mind. Trust me on this.
I recently had to fix my parents' machine, because it got massively infected. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because I ended up flattening it and reinstalling XP from Microsoft's disks rather than the crappy OEM version that was preinstalled on it, but that's another story.
My father had a subscription to Norton. So, why didn't Norton protect him against the virus? Well, a quick install and run of AVG later, I figured out why: Norton had been lobotomised by the virus. Half of its files were corrupted beyond repair. Most of the Javascript that its crappy UI was written in had been replaced by binaries. It was like one of those caterpillars whose brain gets eaten by wasp larvae, and the caterpillar never notices. It was horrific.
Unfortunately I still can't persuade him that AVG (which is free, which gets good reviews, which actually seems to work, and which doesn't keep popping up crap in your face) might be a better choice on the new system; but hopefully the new improved installation will protect him. We'll see.
I think the Lib Dems have two main things going for them: firstly, given half a chance they're going to push for electoral reform, which this country urgently needs; and secondly, they're really good at winding up the other two parties and pointing out the things they'd rather people not notice. So despite the fact that they're unlikely ever to gain power, and probably would do really badly if they ever did make it, I still think they're really useful.
It would still be nice to have a real government, though.
Or there's Nucleus, VxWorks, QNX, one of the several proprietary phone OSs (you'll probably only pick one of these if you're part of the same group that owns the OS)... there are lots of RTOSs out there that are suitable for phones, especially the low-end phones that you wouldn't want to run a heavyweight OS on.
The thing I'm surprised about is that nobody (we hear about) seems to be using BSD. The BSDs are traditionally easier to port than Linux, and have a much friendlier license to commercial use; so why aren't the phone manufacturers using that?
Not at all snarky --- I'm quite serious! The more I use computers, the more I appreciate techniques that don't use them...
We used a dab of solid glue in the middle of each stuck-on section, just to hold it in place. (Pritt-Stick, usually.) That stuff's excellent because you can just pull it apart again to rearrange. We never had any problems with visible seams, but then in those days it was all analog copiers in high-contrast mode, and putting the lid down would flatten the copy sufficiently. When photocopying print, we could usually do three or four generations before degradation started becoming apparent.
Now, for real Old Skool Kopying, you want a Banda. Mmm, that smell...
The modern version works like this: you need a photocopier, your source material, a pair of scissors, and a stick of solid glue. Photocopy all your source materials. Cut them up. Stick them onto a blank piece of paper in the order you want. Photocopy. All the seams miraculously vanish, and you end up with an extremely professional-looking end result.
It's a great deal easier than scanning and using a DTP package, it's faster, and it can also produce better results depending on your photocopier and scanner. I wouldn't use it for anything that needed to be stored for long periods of time --- your template is fragile and will fall apart if stored --- but for quickly putting together posters, exam questions (I inherited the technique from my father, who was a teacher), simple fliers, news clipping collections etc, it's first rate.
Don't get glue on the photocopier plate. It'll never come off.
And he's totally right too. I am using a 7 or 8 year old MS Optical Wheel Mouse that has literally outlived several dozen Apple and Logitech mice in our office. And it has great features and feels nice on the hand and wrist as well.
Absolutely. I'm currently using a Microsoft optical travel mouse and Microsoft Internet Keyboard, which I bought on the merits of the brand (!), and they're excellent. The keyboard is even designed for easy maintenance: you undo a couple of screws underneath, and the entire top shell lifts off, keys included. You can now just unclip the keys, chuck it into a dishwasher, clip the keys back on again, replace, and you now have a clean keyboard. You don't even have to unplug it.
Add to that the decent size, comfortable feel, the built-in USB hub (USB 1, alas --- I bought it a while ago), and the fact that it cost me about a tenner, and it's definitely a nice piece of kit.
Given that I'm currently struggling with a wireless card that every now and again decides to give me 1000+ms ping times to a server ten metres away, I'd have to say...
This is shit. It's like saying (exaggerating) that producers of guns should not give the customer the capability to shoot, since, you know, you could operate illegitimately.
A better anology would be a particular type of car engine which if it's not tuned just right produces large quantities of highly toxic gas --- you really don't want to have people tinkering with those. A misprogrammed wireless card is quite capable of jamming all other cards in its vicinity. It's the FCC's responsibility to ensure that devices conform to the appropriate standards so this doesn't happen. Given that wireless cards are basically software radios, it's only the firmware that makes sure that they stay within their license; if a vendor started producing toolchains to allow any random user to change their programming, I'd imagine that they would be seriously unamused...
(Wait until projects like Gnu Radio start reaching critical mass. You're going to start seeing legal capers that make the file sharing battles look like skirmishes.)
Firmware is just firmware - it runs on a different CPU and only has access to the device. Binary blobs run in your kernel space and could (potentially) mess with anything on your system.
Ah, but the firmware on the wireless card is running, effectively, at a higher privilege level than your kernel --- it can do things totally outside the kernel's control. Even if you are legally allowed to redistribute the image, how do you know what it's doing? Given that all your network traffic is passing through that thing, and that it's got complete unsupervised control over all the radio bandwidth it can eat, and that on some interfaces (such as PCI) they can even access host memory... there's a lot of scope for malicious behaviour. Without source, they can't be audited. That's what I mean by the binary blob problem.
(The firmware source code probably includes lots of deeply patented and proprietry frequency-hopping and radio control software, which the FCC would be deeply unamused to have people play with; most likely there's also going to be a third-party embedded operating system, too, to make it all go. It would probably be a legal nightmare to release source.)
(You're right in that there's not much difference between uploaded firmware and firmware in ROM --- it's just a variation of the same problem.)
Now, wireless is here and for some reason, there must be a thousand different manufacturers with their own proprietary chipsets with completely different drivers & BIOS data on the flash memory stored in those chips because I've only had Ubuntu work once out of the box on a Linksys PCI WiFi card. Why? Why isn't that standardized? What do the companies gain from that? Is it because of the ever changing standards that the chips are so wacky? Is it because the A, B, G, N, etc. protocols? I don't understand this because I've never coded drivers.
Because wireless hardware is really complicated.
Typically a wireless card is a microcontroller with ROM, RAM, and a CPU --- usually an ARM. One end is plugged into the radio, of which there are a zillion different varieties. The other end is plugged into your computer.
Some wireless cards don't have their software on ROM --- which means that in order to make it work, the first thing you have to do is to upload the software from your PC. This is the infamous 'binary blob' problem. That software is highly proprietry and really, really hard to write. So far (although I could be wrong) there are no open source firmware replacements.
Even once you have the card programmed and running, you still need to talk to it. This usually involves a driver that needs to know how to talk to the wireless card's host hardware (the bit between the microcontroller and your computer), the firmware itself (which may have different command sets for different versions of the firmware), and sometimes you even need to know implementation details of the radio chipset. That's a lot of information you need access to, and it all interacts in rather horrible ways. (Also, FCC regulations may mean that the vendors aren't allowed to give you information that could be used to, say, make the card operate on unauthorised frequencies...)
It also doesn't help that the Linux wireless layer isn't terribly well designed: the abstraction layers are in the wrong place, which means that in order to write a driver you have to duplicate a lot of code. That's one reason why the BSD operating systems typically have better wireless support. Their driver framework makes it a lot easier to write wireless drivers.
The good cards usually have well-designed firmware on ROM with a sufficiently abstract interface that implementation details aren't exposed. They're easy to support, because the vendor can change the implementation without having to change the driver. The bad cards have firmware that's loaded at run time that exposes lots of implementation details that the vendor can't tell you about because the third party whose radio chipset they're using made them sign an NDA. (Or just because they don't want to. Broadcom fits this category.) They require lots of unpleasant reverse engineering.
So, in short, wireless drivers are hard because wireless cards are really complicated.
Tubgirl, too. And because they provide textual descriptions of what they are, you can satisfy your curiosity without actually having to gouge your brain out afterwards! It's great!
Highest levels of the underground? That means they're just below the surface, right? And they've been planning their takeover for almost two years? They don't sound all that motivated to me...
There is no response in the second atom. If two particles are entangled, no measurement or manipulation of one can change the measurement outcome statistics of the other. You just know that if you measure them a certain way, the results will be correlated. It can seem like a subtle difference...
Greg Egan has a good version: paraphrased, you have a coin on Earth, and a coin on Mars. They're entangled. You flip them. You get random results.
Now you turn on a widget on Earth. You continue to flip them. You continue to get random results, at both ends. But now they're the same random results.
The key fact is: you don't know that this is happening, until you can get a communication from Earth to Mars or vice versa describing what the results are. Once you do, you can compare the results, and say: hey, during this time period both coins were producing identical results! Maybe the widget was turned on! Or it could be just chance, of course. The coins are random, after all.
So while it's interesting, it's not useful as a communications medium.
(It is, however, great for a means of generating encryption keys. Earth wants to send a message to Mars? Earth turns on the widget, waits a bit, turns it off again. It then sends a message saying, the sequence from X to Y is the encryption key, here's a message encrypted with it. During that period, the coin on Mars has produced the same random sequence of bits as the one on Earth --- so you get the same key at both ends, without having to transmit it! But you still haven't transferred any actual information until you transmit the encrypted message, via conventional means.)
What if I want to use their card on PowerPC, want to link against the latest (or a non-mainline) kernel, or just want to run an all-open system?
On a related note: does anyone know if it's possible to get standalone graphics cards with Intel 3D graphics hardware on them?
I know that on an absolute scale, the Intel chipsets aren't particularly fast... but they're certainly faster than the Radeon 9600 mobility I've got right now, and there are genuinely open source accelerated drivers for them. Which means they ought to be much less of a hassle to use. For 2D and lightweight 3D use, they should be ideal.
But I've only ever seen them in integrated chipsets, and I'd rather not buy a whole new motherboard just to get a new graphics card...
New thoughts cease to be developed as they cannot yet withstand the pressure of public scrutiny... It also means humans as a whole cannot develop new ideas in response to changes in their environment which will doubtless keep happening... That destroys the humans...
Hmm.
Counter-example: China. It's the longest and most successful culture on the planet. It's also the most conservative and resistant to new ideas. It places a much lesser emphasis on privacy, and a much greater one of conformity and tradition. However, it's one of the most creative and entrepeneurial, which means it's going to whip the West's collective asses, economically and socially, in the next twenty years.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually...
The moon is a really good place to settle. There is a gravity well; but it's such a small one that you get the convenience without the penalty. It's nice having things fall down; it makes all kinds of useful resources --- rock, ice, metal --- easily accessible, and you don't have to worry about stuff drifting off. Not to mention that all the production techniques we know about involve gravity at some point. It's also nice having such a ludicrously small gravity well that you can get into orbit with something the size of an Apollo lander rather than a Saturn V. It's an excellent compromise.
It's also really nice being three days travel away from home. In the event of an emergency, it's entirely feasible to sprint home directly from the lunar surface. You can't do that from an asteroid, where you've travelled for months just to get there.
You're right in that asteroids are excellent places for robotic mining... unfortunately, we don't know how to do that yet. The state of the art just isn't there. Given that we still don't have the technology to travel anywhere in other than a minimum-energy transfer orbit taken months, and that mission planners have to plot crazy momentum-stealing flybys of practically every inner planet in order to minimise delta-V, launching experimental robot refineries from the surface of the Earth just isn't going to happen. Wait another twenty years and build 'em on the Moon instead. You'll have the knowledge, the personnel, the materials, and you won't have to lift them out of Earth's huge gravity well.
You urgently, urgently need to read The Atrocity Archives, by Charlie Stross. You will very quickly change your mind. Trust me on this.
I recently had to fix my parents' machine, because it got massively infected. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because I ended up flattening it and reinstalling XP from Microsoft's disks rather than the crappy OEM version that was preinstalled on it, but that's another story.
My father had a subscription to Norton. So, why didn't Norton protect him against the virus? Well, a quick install and run of AVG later, I figured out why: Norton had been lobotomised by the virus. Half of its files were corrupted beyond repair. Most of the Javascript that its crappy UI was written in had been replaced by binaries. It was like one of those caterpillars whose brain gets eaten by wasp larvae, and the caterpillar never notices. It was horrific.
Unfortunately I still can't persuade him that AVG (which is free, which gets good reviews, which actually seems to work, and which doesn't keep popping up crap in your face) might be a better choice on the new system; but hopefully the new improved installation will protect him. We'll see.
I think the Lib Dems have two main things going for them: firstly, given half a chance they're going to push for electoral reform, which this country urgently needs; and secondly, they're really good at winding up the other two parties and pointing out the things they'd rather people not notice. So despite the fact that they're unlikely ever to gain power, and probably would do really badly if they ever did make it, I still think they're really useful.
It would still be nice to have a real government, though.
Imagine how far up he was if after two months of climbing, he still hasn't gotten out yet...
I've heard it said that John Howard's head is so far up Bush's arse that he can nearly see Tony Blair's feet.
Yes, I'm British. No, I didn't vote for him. How could you tell?
I dunno; there are already enough frozen corpses floating around the place...
There's a saying: a statistician is someone you call in to help you study your results, who then tells you why your experiment was wrong.
Good experiments are surprisingly hard to design...
Or there's Nucleus, VxWorks, QNX, one of the several proprietary phone OSs (you'll probably only pick one of these if you're part of the same group that owns the OS)... there are lots of RTOSs out there that are suitable for phones, especially the low-end phones that you wouldn't want to run a heavyweight OS on.
The thing I'm surprised about is that nobody (we hear about) seems to be using BSD. The BSDs are traditionally easier to port than Linux, and have a much friendlier license to commercial use; so why aren't the phone manufacturers using that?
Not at all snarky --- I'm quite serious! The more I use computers, the more I appreciate techniques that don't use them...
We used a dab of solid glue in the middle of each stuck-on section, just to hold it in place. (Pritt-Stick, usually.) That stuff's excellent because you can just pull it apart again to rearrange. We never had any problems with visible seams, but then in those days it was all analog copiers in high-contrast mode, and putting the lid down would flatten the copy sufficiently. When photocopying print, we could usually do three or four generations before degradation started becoming apparent.
Now, for real Old Skool Kopying, you want a Banda. Mmm, that smell...
...and it works spectacularly well.
The modern version works like this: you need a photocopier, your source material, a pair of scissors, and a stick of solid glue. Photocopy all your source materials. Cut them up. Stick them onto a blank piece of paper in the order you want. Photocopy. All the seams miraculously vanish, and you end up with an extremely professional-looking end result.
It's a great deal easier than scanning and using a DTP package, it's faster, and it can also produce better results depending on your photocopier and scanner. I wouldn't use it for anything that needed to be stored for long periods of time --- your template is fragile and will fall apart if stored --- but for quickly putting together posters, exam questions (I inherited the technique from my father, who was a teacher), simple fliers, news clipping collections etc, it's first rate.
Don't get glue on the photocopier plate. It'll never come off.
I think what he meant was that the fact that it is pure junk science is completely uncontroversial.
Absolutely. I'm currently using a Microsoft optical travel mouse and Microsoft Internet Keyboard, which I bought on the merits of the brand (!), and they're excellent. The keyboard is even designed for easy maintenance: you undo a couple of screws underneath, and the entire top shell lifts off, keys included. You can now just unclip the keys, chuck it into a dishwasher, clip the keys back on again, replace, and you now have a clean keyboard. You don't even have to unplug it.
Add to that the decent size, comfortable feel, the built-in USB hub (USB 1, alas --- I bought it a while ago), and the fact that it cost me about a tenner, and it's definitely a nice piece of kit.
Given that I'm currently struggling with a wireless card that every now and again decides to give me 1000+ms ping times to a server ten metres away, I'd have to say...
No.
A better anology would be a particular type of car engine which if it's not tuned just right produces large quantities of highly toxic gas --- you really don't want to have people tinkering with those. A misprogrammed wireless card is quite capable of jamming all other cards in its vicinity. It's the FCC's responsibility to ensure that devices conform to the appropriate standards so this doesn't happen. Given that wireless cards are basically software radios, it's only the firmware that makes sure that they stay within their license; if a vendor started producing toolchains to allow any random user to change their programming, I'd imagine that they would be seriously unamused...
(Wait until projects like Gnu Radio start reaching critical mass. You're going to start seeing legal capers that make the file sharing battles look like skirmishes.)
Ah, but the firmware on the wireless card is running, effectively, at a higher privilege level than your kernel --- it can do things totally outside the kernel's control. Even if you are legally allowed to redistribute the image, how do you know what it's doing? Given that all your network traffic is passing through that thing, and that it's got complete unsupervised control over all the radio bandwidth it can eat, and that on some interfaces (such as PCI) they can even access host memory... there's a lot of scope for malicious behaviour. Without source, they can't be audited. That's what I mean by the binary blob problem.
(The firmware source code probably includes lots of deeply patented and proprietry frequency-hopping and radio control software, which the FCC would be deeply unamused to have people play with; most likely there's also going to be a third-party embedded operating system, too, to make it all go. It would probably be a legal nightmare to release source.)
(You're right in that there's not much difference between uploaded firmware and firmware in ROM --- it's just a variation of the same problem.)
Because wireless hardware is really complicated.
Typically a wireless card is a microcontroller with ROM, RAM, and a CPU --- usually an ARM. One end is plugged into the radio, of which there are a zillion different varieties. The other end is plugged into your computer.
Some wireless cards don't have their software on ROM --- which means that in order to make it work, the first thing you have to do is to upload the software from your PC. This is the infamous 'binary blob' problem. That software is highly proprietry and really, really hard to write. So far (although I could be wrong) there are no open source firmware replacements.
Even once you have the card programmed and running, you still need to talk to it. This usually involves a driver that needs to know how to talk to the wireless card's host hardware (the bit between the microcontroller and your computer), the firmware itself (which may have different command sets for different versions of the firmware), and sometimes you even need to know implementation details of the radio chipset. That's a lot of information you need access to, and it all interacts in rather horrible ways. (Also, FCC regulations may mean that the vendors aren't allowed to give you information that could be used to, say, make the card operate on unauthorised frequencies...)
It also doesn't help that the Linux wireless layer isn't terribly well designed: the abstraction layers are in the wrong place, which means that in order to write a driver you have to duplicate a lot of code. That's one reason why the BSD operating systems typically have better wireless support. Their driver framework makes it a lot easier to write wireless drivers.
The good cards usually have well-designed firmware on ROM with a sufficiently abstract interface that implementation details aren't exposed. They're easy to support, because the vendor can change the implementation without having to change the driver. The bad cards have firmware that's loaded at run time that exposes lots of implementation details that the vendor can't tell you about because the third party whose radio chipset they're using made them sign an NDA. (Or just because they don't want to. Broadcom fits this category.) They require lots of unpleasant reverse engineering.
So, in short, wireless drivers are hard because wireless cards are really complicated.
Tubgirl, too. And because they provide textual descriptions of what they are, you can satisfy your curiosity without actually having to gouge your brain out afterwards! It's great!
Ah, Wikipedia --- is there any useless piece of pop culture trivia you don't know?
Ta. Should have looked there in the first place.
I presume their train got stuck at Edgeware Road.
Thanks, but, uh, I don't do golf. So it's still not helping...
What the hell is a golf clap, anyway?
Greg Egan has a good version: paraphrased, you have a coin on Earth, and a coin on Mars. They're entangled. You flip them. You get random results.
Now you turn on a widget on Earth. You continue to flip them. You continue to get random results, at both ends. But now they're the same random results.
The key fact is: you don't know that this is happening, until you can get a communication from Earth to Mars or vice versa describing what the results are. Once you do, you can compare the results, and say: hey, during this time period both coins were producing identical results! Maybe the widget was turned on! Or it could be just chance, of course. The coins are random, after all.
So while it's interesting, it's not useful as a communications medium.
(It is, however, great for a means of generating encryption keys. Earth wants to send a message to Mars? Earth turns on the widget, waits a bit, turns it off again. It then sends a message saying, the sequence from X to Y is the encryption key, here's a message encrypted with it. During that period, the coin on Mars has produced the same random sequence of bits as the one on Earth --- so you get the same key at both ends, without having to transmit it! But you still haven't transferred any actual information until you transmit the encrypted message, via conventional means.)
On a related note: does anyone know if it's possible to get standalone graphics cards with Intel 3D graphics hardware on them?
I know that on an absolute scale, the Intel chipsets aren't particularly fast... but they're certainly faster than the Radeon 9600 mobility I've got right now, and there are genuinely open source accelerated drivers for them. Which means they ought to be much less of a hassle to use. For 2D and lightweight 3D use, they should be ideal.
But I've only ever seen them in integrated chipsets, and I'd rather not buy a whole new motherboard just to get a new graphics card...
Hmm.
Counter-example: China. It's the longest and most successful culture on the planet. It's also the most conservative and resistant to new ideas. It places a much lesser emphasis on privacy, and a much greater one of conformity and tradition. However, it's one of the most creative and entrepeneurial, which means it's going to whip the West's collective asses, economically and socially, in the next twenty years.